Moving Toward Mentorship

Here's an update from the HVLA Mentorship committee:

At the beginning of the school year, a call went out to the HVLA membership for volunteers to create a mentorship committee. In late November, we held our first planning meeting. A mentorship program is a complicated beast. It involves determining a clear purpose, recruiting mentors & mentees, training participants, and ensuring confidentiality. Launching a mentorship program is the committee’s long-term goal. As a first step, we decided to spend this year establishing a series of Empowerment Meet-Ups, open to all members of HVLA, with the purpose of gathering a supportive group of colleagues to discuss and brainstorm specific topics in a casual atmosphere. Librarians would be encouraged to come armed with an idea or project they are trying to implement or realize in their school. Our collective energies, positive collaboration and creativity could then be used to pose solutions, provide suggestions or facilitate sharing 
of resources. Possible future meet-up topics include, 

• Catching the Big Fish: Landing the Library Job You Want 

• Clever Collaboration with Teachers

• Research Projects “Show and Tell”

• Expanding Your Professional Network

The first meet-up will take place early in the New Year in a central location (near Union 
Square). The topic will be “Advocating for You and Your Library Program.” We hope to 
see many of you there.

---Laura Bishop, Rachel Berkey, Angela Carstensen, Nishette Isaac

December Book Club

Date/Time:
Thursday December 12, 5:45

Location:
Elizabeth Irwin High School - meet in the library
40 Charlton Street
(between 6th Ave and Varick)

What We're Reading:
A Corner of White by Jaclyn Moriarty

If time permits, we will also discuss the follow up to The Raven Boys:
The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater

AASL - Top 10 Takeaways

This week we are excited to have a guest post from one of our HVLA scholarship winners, Christina Karvounis!

The week of November 13-17, I attended the bi-annual American Association of School Librarians conference in Hartford, CT. This was my first library conference and it was outstanding. I attended 1 pre-conference leadership workshop, 8 topical workshops on topics ranging from choosing multicultural titles to utilizing iPads in the library to guided inquiry in research and beyond, visited with many booksellers and vendors, and added many new professional contacts to my #PLN.

TOP TEN THEMES/THINGS LEARNED AT AASL13

10. Only 10% of books published in the last decade were authored by people of color - be aware and continue to be a champion for change.

9. Consider creating a MakerSpace in your library. Or become one.

8. Curiosity and creativity are essential 21st century skills - deepen them - offer opportunities for students to deepen them - in your library.

7. Create/cultivate a culture of collaboration!

6. Scaffold opportunities for regular, meaningful, reflective inquiry.

5. Create library centers: Lego poetry, read to self, puzzles, word building, draw an ad for a favorite book, bookmark creating.

4. Essential Applications: Scratch, Animoto, VoiceThread, iMovie

3. Rudine Sims Bishop: "Mirrors, Windows, Sliding Glass Doors" is a must read.

2. Keep ear to the classroom for 'just in time' learning.

and the top theme I gathered from AASL13 was:

1. Jump in with both feet! Try new connections, technologies, styles, collaborative techniques, applications for sharing -- challenges always present themselves; get going!

I came home energized by the experience but also concerned about ways to implement ideas. At Brooklyn Friends School, Kathy and I work together in the PS/LS library - and we've already implemented many of the strategies we learned at the conference and are in conversation on others. It was an excellent conference and I highly recommend it!

Literary Events

Here's a list of great literary events that are coming soon!!!

• A Closer Look at Norman Rockwell: Deborah Solomon in Conversation with Jason Farago at McNally Jackson Books. Date: Today, Monday November 25 7:00pm. Location: 52 Prince Street, New York, NY 10012. Noted biographer and art critic Deborah Solomon, author of American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell, will provide new reflections on the reality of the man who for so many years provided America with an idealized image of itself.

• Geoff Dyer in conversation with Ben Lerner at McNally Jackson Books. Date: Tuesday November 26, 7:00pm. Location: 52 Prince Street, New York, NY 10012. Two scribes who like to talk about art sit to discuss "writing about looking." Dyer often considers photography in personal and journalistic contexts (e.g., in The Ongoing Moment and Otherwise Known as the Human Condition); Lerner touched on the same in his memoiristic Leaving the Atocha Station.

• Brooklyn by the Book: Malcolm Gladwell at BPL/Congregation Beth Elohim. Date: Thursday December 5 2013, 7:30 PM to 9:00 PM. Location: 274 Garfield Place, Brooklyn, NY 11215. Gladwell reads and discusses "David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants".

• Edwidge Danticat: Haiti Noir 2: The Classics at Brooklyn Public Library. Date Thursday January 16 2014, 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM. Location: 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, NY 11238.  Edwidge Danticat reads and discusses this volume of classic Haitian noir literature by authors such as Marie-Hélène Laforest, Dany Laferrière, Pierre Marcelin, Philippe Thoby-Marcelin and more.



 

The ABC of it: why children's books matter

 

The Joy of Children’s Literature

I can still remember how the joy I felt as a child reading my favorite books, from the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and Archie Comics to such classics as Tuck Everlasting, The Neverending Story and A Wrinkle in Time. Those books and many others helped shaped the way I read and the way I view the world. We all have our favorite children’s books which are dear to us and have also found recent children’s books that speak to us as adults.

The New York Public Library has an amazing exhibition called The ABC of it: why children’s books matter. This exhibition celebrates the extraordinary richness, artistry, and diversity of children’s literature across cultures and time. If you have any time, please go and enjoy this extraordinary tour given by NYPL.

  

New York Times: Perserving the Future From the Past

 

New York Time article 

Lack of Diversity in Children's Literature

 

As I was thinking about my first blog entry for the month of November, two things happened simultaneously. First, during my book club meeting, the conversation quickly revealed that members felt that they were not represented in the literature that we were discussing. As such, they felt that the articles we had amassed on our topic of discussion was not authentic.  Secondly, a book club member asked for children’s books suggestions for her young niece who happened to be African American. Although ShelfLives, my book club which was formed in early 2002 with ten friends, was meeting to discuss our latest book and although we started to discuss the novel, the conversation quickly turned into the lack of diversity in children’s’ literature.

You see for us, a group of ten professionals from different cultures, it has been something that has also come up when we discussed our own childhood. We never saw ourselves or our families in the books we read as children. This is also something that comes to mind when I am ordering books for the library at my school. I want the students to come to the library and choose from books that reflect true diversity in race, gender, sexual orientation and social class.

Lack of diversity in children’s literature is a real problem that must not be ignored. In a study done last year, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center reviewed thousands of kids' books, and found that only 3.3 percent were about African-Americans, 2.1 percent were about Asian-Pacific Americans, 1.5 percent were about Latinos and only 0.6 percent were about American Indians.[1]  To truly foster a love of reading and to cultivate connections, children need to see their stories and realities reflected in the books they read. 

So, this is my question to my fellow HVLA members; how can we solve this problem? What are we to do for there to be more books with varied content so that children can experience the richness of each other’s stories?

---

[1] The stories for all project: First ever market solution to the lack of diversity in kids' books. (2013, Jun 13). PR Newswire. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1367081690?accountid=4314